Settler Common Sense

Abstract

Settler Common Sense considers how writings by several canonical mid-nineteenth-century authors that are not “about” Indians still participate in processes of settler colonialism. More than focusing on the ways Native peoples are treated and imagined by non-natives, the book illustrates how the legal concepts, practices, and geographies developed in claiming Native lands and displacing Native peoples live on in the everyday lives of non-natives even when political struggles with Native peoples seem to be of the past. Rifkin shows how authors implicitly draw on such ongoing histories as the background for offering queer critiques of state policy. While displacing the nuclear family and engaging with forms of desire and family-formation that would have been understood as deviant, these writers all imagine a kind of place to which one might flee that allows one to exist beyond government influence – a space in which one can discover and experiment with more democratic ways of being in the world. However, those very spaces become available for such imaginative investment as a result of displacing Indigenous sovereignties, treating the “domestic” space of the nation as self-evident despite the persistence of Native peoples and claims. Unlike existing work that focuses on representations of Native peoples, Settler Common Sense emphasizes how the imperial incorporation of Native lands into the U.S. nation-state shapes everyday non-native perception, experience, and ethics.

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